7 Morning Routine Tips for ADHD Adults: Make Mornings Easier

Can we talk about the struggle of getting ready in the morning with an ADHD brain?

Let’s be real; for some of us, those morning hours present a real obstacle. 

In fact, I recently received an email from someone asking, “I’d love some tips on what to do when I’m feeling blah in the morning and it takes a while to start the day.”

And I have heard different variations of this same request time and time again.  

But why is that?

Why do some of us with ADHD especially struggle with task initiation in those early morning hours? 

In Episode 249 of the I’m Busy Being Awesome podcast, we’re exploring that very question.

We’re talking about five major obstacles ADHD brains face when it comes to kickstarting our days.

From lower dopamine levels to time blindness and decision fatigue to overstimulation, we uncover the leading roadblocks that keep us from moving forward.

Then, we explore seven actionable strategies to kickstart your mornings with less friction.

Give the episode a listen and put them to use today! 

You can listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app here.

Prefer to read? No problem! Keep scrolling for the full transcript.

In Episode 249: You Will Discover

• Why adults with ADHD often struggle with slow starts in the morning
• What friction points might be slowing down your morning routine
• Specific supports to start your mornings with greater ease

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Episode #249: 7 Morning Routine Tips for ADHD Adults: Make Mornings Easier (Transcript)

Today we’re exploring a listener question, which I can’t wait to share with you. Before we get started, I want to give a couple of shout-outs to a few of you busy awesome listeners who recently left reviews for the podcast. 

Thank you both for making time in your busy days to rate and review the podcast. When each of you carves out a little time in your day to do this, or you snap a screenshot of the episode and share it on your stories, or you pass along an episode to a friend who might find it useful, this is EVERYTHING. It is truly one of the best ways you can help support the podcast, and I genuinely appreciate it. So thank you again. 

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Now, this week, we’re looking at a question from a busy-awesome listener who wrote to me saying:

“One of the areas I’m struggling with—and I’m sure others are, too—is feeling blah in the morning and taking a while to get the day started.”

And they are absolutely right. I often talk with clients about this slow start to the morning, whether it’s actually a problem or not, and if so, what we can do about it. How can we start our mornings with a little less friction?

Let’s be honest, to several related factors, starting the day can be particularly challenging with an ADHD brain. ADHD impacts our brain’s executive functions, which include organizing, prioritizing, starting tasks, and maintaining focus. These functions are crucial for initiating our day smoothly. But why is that? And what can we do?

That’s what we’re exploring today.

We’ll begin by breaking down what might be in the way of a smoother start to the morning. Then we’ll explore some strategies to help us get started.

5 Obstacles with Mornings (When You Have ADHD)

When I considered the different frictions that prevent a smooth start, I came up with five core obstacles.

There are certainly many more, but I hope this provides a helpful starting point to put our potentially slower starts into context. 

1. Task Initiation and Dopamine

Our prefrontal cortex, which houses our executive functions, is responsible for things like planning, decision-making, and starting tasks. As ADHD brains, this part of our brain often doesn’t work as efficiently or reliably. It’s underdeveloped. Not surprisingly, this makes it more difficult to initiate activities, especially those that seem boring, mundane, or require significant effort. 

As we’ve explored in earlier episodes, studies suggest that dopamine levels are significantly lower in ADHD brains, which impacts our ability to easily engage in tasks that don’t offer immediate or intense rewards. Since typical morning routines are repetitive and predictable, they might not provide enough stimulation to overcome this hurdle, making the start of the day particularly challenging.

So one of the first main obstacles here is the lack of dopamine to help us initiate these more mundane tasks.

2. Time Blindness

Another major obstacle could be our time blindness. Many of us with ADHD navigate pretty intense time blindness, which means we have a hard time estimating how long tasks will take or organizing them effectively in a sequence. 

Keeping that in mind, let’s think about our mornings. I’ve heard from many of you that you have every intention of following some kind of morning routine. In fact, you wish you could follow one more reliably. One of the big challenges that gets in the way is related to our time blindness.

Because we’re so time-blind, we don’t realize we’re trying to fit a day’s worth of tasks within a 1-2 hour window. So we end up starting each day feeling rushed and chaotic, totally behind schedule. I mean, it’s no wonder that after a while, we don’t even want to try anymore, especially when it feels so stressful when we do.

So the second potential piece of friction is our time blindness. 

3. Decision Fatigue

Number three is decision fatigue. When we dive further into slow starts, mornings are essentially made up of a huge series of tiny decisions that we need to make in order to get out the door or to our home office on time (e.g., whether you have time to walk the dog, which podcast to listen to if you do, whether you have time to shower, and if so, whether you have time to wash your hair, choosing an outfit, deciding on breakfast).

This is just what comes to the top of my mind. The list is much longer than this – especially for those of you with kids and partners who are asking questions and need answers – and these constant decisions can quickly overwhelm any brain – especially one with ADHD. 

And in no time flat, we manage to reach decision fatigue before the day even begins. We’ve drained our cognitive resources before we get to work, which – not surprisingly – makes it even harder to engage.

So obstacle three: decision fatigue

4. Variable Energy Levels

From what I’ve read in the research and also found to be true for myself and my clients, ADHDers often report fluctuating energy levels, which can be particularly low in the morning or when navigating cognitively demanding tasks. 

Imagine a roller coaster where the energy levels are the car. For some of us, mornings might be the part of the ride where the car slowly climbs up, requiring more effort to reach a more reliable level of functioning. So this variability adds another layer of difficulty in establishing and maintaining a reliable routine or rhythm to get you out the door on time since the energy required to start the day isn’t always readily available.

Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome

Underneath this umbrella, I also want to mention our struggles with sleep. I’ll be talking about this further in some upcoming episodes, so stay tuned. But for now, I do want to mention there’s a higher number of us, as ADHD brains, who struggle with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. This is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder that involves a shift in the natural sleep-wake cycle, leading to later sleep and wake times.

Essentially, in Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, your internal clock, which dictates sleepiness and wakefulness, runs later than the typical cycle. So this can mean difficulty falling asleep until late at night and a struggle to wake up early on the other side since our body’s clock isn’t aligned with conventional sleep times.

The misalignment of the sleep-wake cycle makes waking up at a “standard” time exceptionally challenging. When the rest of the world is starting the day, a person with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and ADHD might still be in the deep stages of sleep, making it hard to get out of bed and begin morning tasks.

Again, I plan to have an entire episode on this, so stay tuned. But I wanted to mention it here as a potential culprit of why those of us with ADHD might struggle to get going in the morning overall.

5. Sensitivity to External Stimulation

Mornings usually involve a lot of sensory input—loud alarms, bright lights, and potentially noisy environments. If you’re super sensitive like I am, this excess of stimulation can quickly lead to sensory overload before the day even starts. When we’re at capacity, it’s even more challenging to focus and engage in the things we want to do to get the day started. 

We might freeze up and not be able to take the next step. We might get totally overwhelmed and check out, scrolling on our phones. We might start tackling a bunch of different projects that are completely unrelated to our morning routine because we’re so overstimulated and feel the need to release our energy in some way.

So what can we do? How can we help ourselves get going in the morning?

7 Tips To Improve Your Morning Routine as an Adult with ADHD

1. Establish a Simple Routine with Timed Tasks

Why It’s Impactful: For someone with ADHD, knowing how much time each task takes removes the guesswork and reduces the risk of getting sidetracked.

Does it take a little time and iteration to figure out how much time you need? Yes. Is that kind of annoying? Yes.

But here’s what’s also true. It’s also annoying when we’re feeling stuck or always rushed and starting our day feeling completely overwhelmed.  Plus, the time is going to pass anyway, so we might as well gather some data about how long things take as it passes.

Especially because there is tech to help with this. I’ve mentioned on the podcast before, there are apps out there like Routinist, which can help you allocate a precise time duration to each activity. And this let’s you literally add up how long your morning routine would be if you stuck to that time. Then when it’s time to follow it in the morning, you can check in and see how accurate those times are and make adjustments throughout the week so you have a truly accurate assessment. 

Once you lock in a simple routine, you can do the things you want to do without feeling totally overwhelmed. And it works in this way because simple routines both minimize decision fatigue since you know exactly what to do next and also provide a tangible sense of progres as you move through your routine.

Speaking of decision fatigue, have you snagged my free podcast roadmap yet?

If not, what are you waiting for? I know when I find a new podcast with hundreds of episodes, I can quickly overwhelm myself trying to figure out where to start. That’s where this roadmap comes in. It has the most popular episodes all detailed for you so you can get yourself up to speed and ready to work with your ADHD brain You can grab it now through the show notes or head to imbusybeingawesome.com/map. 

2. Preparation the Night Before

Why It’s Impactful: Once you know what your SIMPLE morning routine is, you can give yourself an even greater gift by preparing as much as you can the night before. Let me tell you, this one step lightens the cognitive load so much for tomorrow-morning-you. Seriously, for an ADHD brain, it can really lower the barrier to initiating tasks and ease that abrupt transition from sleep to wakefulness. 

Now the preparation steps can look very different depending on whether you work from home or out of the house, whether you are just taking care of yourself or you have others you need to help get moving in the morning, etc. But here are a few ideas to get you brainstorming what might be most supportive for you.

• Choose tomorrow’s clothes: Lay out the clothes you plan to wear the next day, including any accessories or shoes. If you’re like me and want to swap out the bag you’re carrying (yes – I totally do this. I love my bags), do that ahead of time, too.
  
• Packing bags: Speaking of bags, do yourself a favor and prepare your bag if you’re leaving the house first thing in the morning. Gather and organize any items you’ll need for the day, whether it’s work materials, gym clothes, or school supplies. Pack your bag so it’s ready to grab on your way out the door.
  
• Meal prep: Prepare your breakfast and/or lunch for the next day as much as you can, whether it’s portioning out ingredients, packing lunches, or prepping overnight oats, whatever.
  • I always fill my two water bottles and put them in the fridge so I have ice-cold water both for my workout in the morning and then to drink throughout the day. I also often have a hard-boiled egg or two in the morning, and I like to peel those the night before.
  • Or I fill my blender with my protein powder, so I just have to drop in the ice cubes and milk to blend it up.
    
  • Seriously, anything to make feeding yourself just a little easier in the morning is a heck yes in my book.
    
  • The same goes for lunches – especially for those of you with kids or who head to the office and need a lunch. Give your brain the beautiful gift of doing it the night before so you’re not so rushed in the morning.
    
• Setting up coffee or tea: You might set up your coffee maker or kettle with water and coffee grounds or tea bags, so all you have to do is press a button or turn on the stove when you wake up.
  
• Reviewing schedule: Take a few minutes to review your schedule for the next day, including any appointments, meetings, or tasks you need to prioritize. This helps you mentally prepare for the day ahead and ensures you don’t forget any important commitments. I love to do this during my shut down routine at the end of the workday, which I talk about in-depth way back in episode 119 of the podcast: Episode 119: 3 Reasons to Use a Shutdown Routine, which I’ll link to in the show notes. 
  
• Prepping essentials: Gather any essential items you’ll need in the morning. If I invoke the Adam Sandler sketch – your phone wallet keys, or work ID badge, and put them in a clear, designated spot near the door. Again, this prevents last-minute scrambling to find those important things before leaving the house.

3. Stimulate Your Brain

Why It’s Impactful: For some of us, engaging in a stimulating activity early on in the day can help jumpstart the brain. It can help elevate dopamine levels, which improves focus and motivation right from the start. Again, this isn’t for everyone, but it’s certainly an impactful approach for me.

So essentially, you’re picking some kind of engaging morning activity, whether it’s physical, mental, or creative. And you incorporate this activity in your morning routine to help kickstart your day. For me it’s my morning workout. For others, it might be meditation or journaling or creative writing or practicing the piano, etc. Something to get the brain moving and thinking in new ways. 

4. Break Tasks into Smaller Steps

Why It’s Impactful: I know—you are all so sick of me saying this over and over, but I’m probably never going to stop. Sorry.

Breaking tasks into smaller steps is important in helping make them more manageable and less daunting. This is particularly beneficial for those of us with ADHD who struggle with task initiation. Plus, it can help build a sense of accomplishment early in the day, providing more momentum.

5. Use Visual Cues and Reminders

Why It’s Impactful: Using visual cues and reminders essentially externalizes the need to remember every step of the routine, which is especially useful for those of us who struggle with working memory and task prioritization. It’s hard to hold all those steps and sequences in our minds, and the visual aids act as tangible prompts that guide you through your morning with less effort.

So you might create a checklist or visual schedule for your morning tasks. You could use sticky notes for reminders in the key places you get ready in the morning. Then, as you go through the routine, tick off completed tasks to visually track your progress and maintain momentum.

6. Morning Light Exposure

Why It’s Impactful: The importance of getting morning sunlight has grown increasingly clear in recent years – especially since Huberman has talked about it so often on his podcast.

Essentially, exposure to morning light can help reset our internal clock, which is particularly beneficial for individuals with ADHD who may have disrupted sleep patterns or difficulty waking up. This natural cue helps signal to the body that it’s time to be awake and alert, and this also helps the synchronization of the sleep-wake cycle. In other words, when practicing this regularly it helps you naturally wake up and fall asleep earlier.

7. Evaluate Medication Timing

Why It’s Impactful: My final tip is one to explore with your doctor for those of you taking medication. I’m not going to give any specific recommendations here because I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. But I will say that there’s an opportunity to talk with your doctor about the proper timing of your meds.

This can really be a critical component for those of us with ADHD, as it helps ensure that our meds are effective when we actually need them to be. So if you notice yourself dragging or really having a hard time getting started on your day and you are taking medication, I really encourage you to connect with your prescriber to look at timing options that might be best for you and your unique circumstances. 

Recap: ADHD Morning Routine

In today’s episode, we delved into the intricacies of starting the day with an ADHD brain. We first talked about the main frictions that often get in the way of that smooth start, including:

1. Task Initiation and Dopamine
2. Time Blindness
3. Decision Fatigue
4. Variable Energy Levels
   • Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome
5. Sensitivity to External Stimulation

Actionable strategies for your ideal ADHD morning routine

• Establish a Simple Routine with Timed Tasks:
  • Reduces guesswork, racing the clock, and decision fatigue, creating a clear morning flow.
    
• Preparation the Night Before:
  • Eases task initiation and morning transitions.
    
• Stimulate Your Brain:
  • Elevates dopamine levels, enhancing focus and motivation.
    
• Break Tasks into Smaller Steps:
  • Makes tasks less daunting and supports task initiation, building early momentum.
    
• Use Visual Cues and Reminders:
  • Supports working memory and task prioritization, guiding you through your morning.
    
• Morning Light Exposure:
  • Resets your internal clock, supporting natural wake and sleep patterns.
    
• Evaluate Medication Timing:
  • Ensures medication efficacy aligns with your daily needs. As always, be sure to discuss this with your doctor for specific advice in your unique situation.

I invite you to start noticing the particular friction in your mornings, and then explore one or two of the suggestions we talked about today. Then let me know how it goes. I’m on Instagram @imbusybeingawesome. Let me know how it goes on the post for this episode or send me a DM. I’d love to hear from you.

Links From The Podcast

• Learn more about We’re Busy Being Awesome here
• Learn about 1:1 coaching here
• Get the top 10 tips to work with your ADHD brain (free ebook!)
• Discover my favorite ADHD resources here
• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System here
• Get the Podcast Roadmap here
• Get the ADHD Routine Revamp here